Canada

Some sentences are hard to read, and we don’t fully understand why. Memory-based and expectation-based constraints both attempt to explain sentence processing difficulties, and decades of sentence processing literature have found evidence in support of both theories. We further investigate theories of sentence processing by exploring subject- and object-extracted relative clause processing in Standard Arabic. We conducted a self-paced reading task and found that SRCs are easier to process than ORCs in Arabic, in line with expectation-based theories. A follow-up analysis of comprehension question answers revealed that when suggested with the possibility of a noisy interpretation, readers preferentially accept an SRC interpretation over an ORC interpretation. Our future research will explore these findings and test the threshold for acceptance of noisy interpretations.

CogSci 2022

Expectations and Noisy-Channel Processing of Relative Clauses in Arabic

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The English use of "they" to refer to a singular referent that is non-specific or of unknown
gender dates back to the 1300s. Recently, "they" has emerged as the dominant pronoun
for individuals who identify as gender nonbinary, and a coherent subset of English
speakers (innovators) explicitly accept "they" when referring to a specific individual of
known gender ((i) “Sarah slept because they were tired”) in off-line judgments. The
present work examines whether on-line comprehension difficulty patterns with off-line
judgments. Using a maze-task, participants' read sentences like (i) containing “they” with
plural or singular subjects, or “he/she” with named subjects that matched or mismatched
in their typical gender. Gender mismatched evoked reading difficulty. Plural “they” also
caused difficulty, but significantly less. Innovators experienced less difficulty with singular
“they” than non-innovators, but still processed plural “they” faster than singular “they”.
This work suggests that the grammar of “they” may have yet to stabilize even for
innovative speakers.

Processing singular "they" is harder than plural "they", but does not cause referential failure

This visual world eye-tracking pilot study investigates the comprehension of register variants (Stelzen_colloquial vs. Beine_standard transl:.‘’legs’) in a German target sentence when this target sentence (mis)matches the formality of a preceding context sentence, given the object argument either matches or mismatches verb meaning constraints (e.g. Ich rasiere bald meine Beine/Stelzen/#Autos/#Karren, transt.: ‘I shave my legs_standard/legs_coll/#cars_standard/#cars_coll’). The aim of this study is to examine whether register congruence rapidly interacts with verb-argument semantic relations. LME results (n=9) show a main effect of verb-argument congruence but no main effect of formality-register congruence at the region between the verb onset and object-argument onset, indicating that verb-argument relations are computed and used rapidly in online language comprehension. These pilot results suggest that situation formality may indeed modulate verb-argument congruency processing, possibly indicating that standard language processing mechanisms interact closely with register representations.

Investigating the real-time effect of register-situation formality congruence versus verb-argument semantic fit during spoken language comprehension

Little research to date has examined how listeners integrate cues to non-native speaker identity in real time sentence processing. Here, we examine listeners’ interpretation of the semantic and socio-pragmatic content of utterances produced by either a foreign accented speaker or a native speaker. Overall, our findings suggest that processing speed was slower in the presence of foreign accents. However, the extra perceptual demands of processing unfamiliar accents did not translate into listeners’ accuracy rates, and in certain sentence contexts, non-native speakers were also more likely to elicit higher semantic or pragmatic interpretation accuracy. Our findings show that non-native speaker identity plays an important role in listeners’ sentence interpretations.

Integrating Non-Native Speaker Identity in Semantic and Pragmatic Processing

The study reported here examined the role of expertise in the composite face effect which constitutes better recognition of the top half of a face when in composite with a congruent vs. an incongruent (in terms of response required) bottom half. Experiment 1a (n=96) used prototype-defined artificial stimuli (checkerboards) to investigate the composite effect. The advantage of using these stimuli is that expertise can be fully controlled. Experiment 1b (n=96) aimed to replicate the composite effect in face stimuli which served as a control and provided a direct comparison of the composite effect between face and checkerboard stimuli. A full experimental design including congruent/incongruent aligned and misaligned composites was used in both experiments to measure the composite effect. Experiment 1a revealed that the composite effect could not be obtained in checkerboard composites. Experiment 1b confirmed the robust composite face effect. We interpret our results as suggesting that expertise/perceptual learning does not contribute to the composite effect for faces.

Investigating the Composite Effect in Prototype-Defined Checkerboards vs. Faces

In recent evidence, classification training can elicit two qualitative patterns of generalization: one is exemplar-based such that close proximity to known members of a category best predicts membership in that category; the other involves inducing a global form of coherence in the mapping between input space and category membership. Such global coherence is an abstraction about category membership – not in the form of clusters or prototypes, but grounded in regularities like categories alternating in input space (Kurtz & Wetzel, 2021) or one category having correlated feature values while the other is anti-correlated (Conaway & Kurtz, 2017). We investigate the extent to which categorization is driven by local match to exemplars versus conforming to global structural regularities using generalization items as critical tests: proximal to members of one category but conforming to the global regularity underlying the other. Results are discussed in terms of implications for theoretical accounts of category learning.

Local versus global coherence in the generalization of category training

We investigated how the properties of lexical items, which label object features, affect concept tokening. We addressed this issue by modeling data from three sources: (1) norms obtained from a dataset of 78,000 features to a set of pictures representing living and nonliving objects; (2) accuracy data from a picture-word priming congruency task with stimuli presented for 50-60 milliseconds; and (3) corpus data on the lexical properties of four different social usage count measures. We conducted two sets of analyses: one relying on sample count-based measures (i.e., measures based on the norming study: sample frequency, cue validity, feature distinctiveness), and a second relying on the social usage count-based measures (i.e., word frequency (WF), contextual diversity (CD), discourse contextual diversity (DCD), and user contextual diversity (UCD). Contrasting count and social usage-based measures allowed us to gain insight into the contribution of diverse semantic and socially oriented contextual measures of lexical items, and how they may affect concept tokening. Our results show that cue validity and feature distinctiveness were negative predictors of participants’ accuracy to congruency decisions—an effect which was more pronounced for distinctive features of living things. There was also a noticeable advantage for the UCD and DCD variables, over CD and WF. Overall, our results suggest that the conceptual system may be organized as a function of both, intrinsic properties of object features and usage based contextual measures of lexical items that label these features.

Which semantic properties of a feature affect access to an object concept?

Rosch (1975) proposed that some exemplars are more typical of a category than others. Typicality gradients have historically been estimated from data collected from human participants. Here, we investigated whether they can be estimated from a computer vision model, VGG19, guided by cognitive science models of concepts and categorization. Following prototype models, we estimated the similarity of each exemplar to the concept prototype computed in two ways (average across all exemplars, most typical exemplar). Following exemplar models, we computed the pairwise similarities between pairs of exemplars and used MDS to order them on a continuum. The prototype-average model achieved the highest rank-order correlation to human typicality ratings of exemplars of the bird category. Thus, computer vision models may have some promise for generating human-like typicality gradients. We are extending this work to utilize newer computer vision models such as ResNet, and to encompass a broader range of categories.

Typicality Gradients in Computer Vision Models

We study the wisdom of the crowd in the context of spatial knowledge, asking participants to identify US states and African countries on unlabeled tile maps. We use two question frames, asking participants to select where the target is present or eliminate where it is absent. Participants generally display overconfidence, often selecting small regions that do not include the target. We find strong wisdom of the crowd effects by aggregating participants' responses, especially by weighting the individual responses according to the size of their selection. The weighted crowd outperforms all but a few participants for the US states and all participants for the African countries. We also find wisdom of the crowd within effects, by aggregating the present and absent frames for the same participant. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding how people express uncertain spatial knowledge and the potential use of crowd aggregation in real-world applications.

The Wisdom of the Crowd and Framing Effects in Spatial Knowledge

Many non-geographic factors influence spatial judgments, which implies that spatial representations are not metrically veridical. We investigated the influence of social and political factors in the geopolitical context of Cyprus–an island divided since 1974 into the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities in the north and south, respectively. Participants (249 Greek Cypriots, 322 Turkish Cypriots) indicated their familiarity with 19 towns, estimated town locations, and the straight-line distance between those towns. They also rated their attitudes toward the other community. Cypriots underestimated distances and contracted the placement of towns within the other community more so than within their own community. Moreover, those more willing to live together with Cypriots from the other community underestimated distances between towns, whereas those less willing to live together overestimated distances. The results support the notion that representations of global-scale environments have multi-faceted origins, including sociopolitical factors not usually associated with spatial representations.

Beyond the physical divide of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots: Social and political variables shape geographical estimates

People often segment spaces into hierarchically structured subspaces. Judgments about inter-point distance and direction are more accurate within than between segments. However, especially in large-scale complex spaces, segmentation may be necessary for flexible navigation. In this study, we looked at spatial segmentation in a real-life city. We asked citizens of Istanbul, a transcontinental city spread over Europe and Asia with natural waterways that divide it into multiple neighborhoods, to indicate how they segment their city and to perform spatial judgments between well-known landmarks. We examined segmentation effects for divisions they endorsed, and for those others use but they do not report using. Additionally, we examined the impact of gender, age, time spent in the city, and frequency of using connecting routes and bridges. We replicated basic segmentation effects for the primary division, used by all, between the European and Asian sides. For the European side, which has a geographic boundary (The Golden Horn), segmentation impaired the accuracy of spatial representation of participants. For the Asian side, where there is a potential division that is more notional, we found different effects. Individual’s age, sex, time spent in the city, and frequency of using connecting routes also influenced spatial judgments. These results suggest that (i) spatial segmentation effects exist in the real-world, (ii) segmentation in a city-scale environment is differently affected by physical and conceptual boundaries, and (iii) sex, age, and navigation experiences are associated with the cognitive representation of a city.

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Expectations and Noisy-Channel Processing of Relative Clauses in Arabic

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Processing singular "they" is harder than plural "they", but does not cause referential failure

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